“Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.”

There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us?

In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person’s development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, “This is me and the world be damned!” Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society – Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.

It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.

The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One’s religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.

Forge in the smithy of your soul.

Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act.

It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.

The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity.

Practice habits were crucial to my development in basketball.

Coaches do so much research about a referee because they believe refereeing is such a crucial part of the game that the result may hinge on what we say or do.

The work the Mexicans are doing in terms of migration control on Mexico’s southern border is crucial to our own border security.

Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

You can’t make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.

The teenage years are ridiculously crucial and hard and, um, awkward.

I would say that it’s important and probably crucial, but I wouldn’t say that everyone has to have it.

The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.